Beer

New short video from the Czech trials. There isn't anything really interesting in the talk. 

Two US test pilots ejected from a (soon to be) Qatari F-15QA in St. Louis. They ejected on the ground. One of them suffered minor injury, the other is unharmed. The plane seems to be quite ok. 

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40667/crew-ejects-from-qatari-f-15qa-fighter-while-on-the-ground-at-airport-near-st-louis

British and American evaluation  of the Tiger Ausf.B. Sadly not very interesting reports, only static factors like ergonomy, building quality or material composition was evaluated. The armor was not fired upon, the resistance was only calculated. The early rounded turret was found to be extremely bad from material point of view with variable material thickness, plates on one side hardened and on the other side not. There was no test driving done (possible a short drive was done but that is not confirmed) and no reliability testing. Turret rotation was tested by the Americans. 

https://warspot.net/372-all-the-king-s-horses

42 minutes ago, Collimatrix said:

Were there ever problems with logistics because the tank MGs and infantry MGs didn't use the same belts?

I don't know but I don't think so. 

The infantry used the UK-59 but armoured vehicles used PK (even infantry version on external mounts on some Soviet vehicles), later they used PKM also in door-mounts of Mi-17, on land Rovers or HMMWW, MaxxPro in Afghanistan and Iraq. The UK-59 isn't the best weapon around and the troops going into combat zones often selected other weapons and the special forces used basically whatever they wanted. I would say they have been used to have mess in ammo and belts... 

Today the army uses a really wild mess of UK-59 (being phased out), PKM/T (except for the PKT in T-72M4CZ it will be replaced too), Minimi, M240, M60E4, few MG3 (on Dingo) and even M134 in Mi-17... Nowadays they buy only Minimi in both 7,62 and 5,56 (much less of them) for the infantry. 

16 minutes ago, Collimatrix said:

@Beer I have a question for the beardiest of Eastern Bloc tank grognards.  What coaxial MG did Czech-made T-55s and T-72s use in Czech service?  PKT or UK Vz. 59T?

PKT. 

The letter T in UK vz.59T doesn't mean the same as for PK. It's not "Tank" but "Těžký" which means "heavy". It's a variant with heavy and longer barrel, a tripod and a larger ammo case (for 250 rounds). AFAIK it was used only on extrenal vehicle mounts in rather distant past (OT-810, OT-62 or various light vehicles but not on tanks). 

I remember reading that during the Second Chechen war there was not a single documented catastrophic explosion because they used only ammo stored in the carousell which itself is extremely unlikely to get hit (at least the horizontal T-72/90 one). 

The bustle storage is safer for the crew but also rather easy target for mission kill. Also the bustle isn't large enough for having autoloader and enough ammo in the same time as well. Trade offs... 

33 minutes ago, Collimatrix said:

I'm somewhat sanguine on radar stealth for ground vehicles.  Aircraft stealth is a formidable engineering problem, of course.  But consider that aircraft are very often being illuminated by radars against the backdrop of the sky, which might as well be pitch black as far as a radar is concerned.  The contrast is nearly perfect.  Aircraft have to worry about being lit up with many different frequencies of radar waves too, which makes the problem harder because not all RAM works well against all frequencies, and different frequencies respond differently to different sized features on the aircraft.

 

A ground vehicle is, well, on the ground.  It's hiding out amongst a bunch of ground clutter, so its RCS reduction will have to be somewhat less extreme for it to blend in vs. against a cold, featureless sky.  Furthermore, the range of frequencies used for fire control and detection radars against ground targets is much smaller; typically millimetric-wave.

So I suspect that useful reduction in detection and targeting range against the sorts of radars seen on attack helicopters is possible for tanks without anything like the extreme shaping seen on stealth aircraft.

It would be interesting to see what effect has the old-school camouflage with branches, some wood lathes or grass in the radar appearance of the tank. It may not be needed to hide from the radar. It may be enough just not to look like a tank on the radar and for that it certainly helps to have sort of random signature. 

3 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

The arrays are made beforehand and then cast-in. Does it look like a pain in the ass to do? Absolutely. As a modeling project, it's a lot of fun however. I've learned a lot about using the "intersect" feature. It's worth noting that a number of Soviet tank designs did this very thing, so it's not unprecedented.

The alternative to casting them in, as you already guessed, is to have a bunch of castings glued together in a weldment around the arrays. But I don't find that nearly as fun to think about, conceptually.

Obviously, the reasonable thing to do would be to make yet another NERA box tank, but that's boooooooring.

AFAIK the Soviets didn't make it cast-in because it's impossible (better to say you can do that with sand rods like in T-72A/M but not with NERA array). They simply cast an opened pocket, put the special armor array inside and welded a cover on top. There are plenty of reason why it is impossible. 

- Temperature of the molten steel is around 1600°C. In such temperature your special armor array would partially melt (rubber for sure) and partially go through very extreme heat treatment which would definitely ruin its properties. 

- Cast steel has high shrinkage ratio around 0,5% at these distances. Anything closed inside which is not extremely rigid would be simply deformed by the shrinking material and anything rigid enough (thick ceramic for example) would bring high internal stress in the steel (personal experience with overmoulding of different materials - in my case combination of steel and plastic - even overmoulding of steel by plastic is not that easy thing). 

From other things I see other issues. Cast steel has low flowability (lower than cast iron). It requires relatively higher thickness/to length ratios and thicker sections need to be near the gate. If you make something like a rectangle of two thick walls connected with two thin walls you can not fill it without having two gates for exmaple. 

Uneven thickness also inevitably causes uneven cooling which results in deformations of the walls. 

Don't get me wrong but for me your design is not feasible for casting. 

12 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

 

Sorry to jump into this thread while I don't take part in the competition myself but I have some questions. 

How do you assemble the armor arrays in these cavities (front hull and turret cheeks) or maybe better to ask how are those cavities made? They don't look castable at all to me. Are they welded from cast pieces? If so I can still see assembly of the special armor arrays as very inconvenient for a mass production if not impossible. 

3 hours ago, delete013 said:

Why would T-90 have deliberately broad turret? Broader turret is afaik undesired but unavoidable, long bustle likewise.

You are wrong. It is deliberately as wide as the tank itself, i.e. its width is maximum possible. Look at the tank from the top and you may realize why. 

Even the T-90A and M and Oplot-M have boxy turrets which are intentionally as wide as possible because there is a very good reason for that.  

3 hours ago, delete013 said:

This is an entirely unsourced estimate:

The last quote should be a clue to indicate that Germans didn't have 84 panthers and a lot of AFVs where Czech brigade was fighting. They likely had so few that no mobile reserve was able to be formed. Hence, no counter-attacks. Snipers were a typical German low asset delaying tactic. Fortifications were a mere delaying factor in German doctrine, which without an active reserve is basically a speedbump. The depth indicates that Germans had nothing mobile to counter an expected armoured attack.
If you find German side of the story (Heinrici's opinion on the situation, for example), then you might get some credible facts out of this.

Man, what are you trying to achieve by argueing about things which are not written in my post? If you suffer from some sort of paranoia where you see between the lines what is not written there, it's entirely your problem. 

The 84 Panthers is number of vehicles presented in the four Panzerdivisions involved in the operation. Nowhere in my post I claimed that all those Panthers were used against the Czechoslovak brigade, neither did I claim that all were operational (that's obviously impossible due to the low Panther rediness rate). That the Czechoslovak brigade fought against Panthers in multiple occasions is a well researched fact documented by photos of destroyed and captured vehicles. 

I have written that there were very few losses from German counterattacks which is simply a well researched fact. Period. I didn't argue about reasons for that, so you can spare your time writting answers to something which was never claimed. 

The Germans had more AFVs than the Soviet/Czechoslovak side at the beginning of the operation, that is also a fact. At the beginning of the second phase the entire attacking force had the 1st CzAB (63 T-34), 5th Soviet GTB (only 21 T-34) and 875th Soviet light SPG regiment (only 10 Su-76M). The defenders had 8th, 16th, 17th, 19th Panzerdivisions and 10th Panzergrenadier division among other forces. It is documented fact that vehicles destroyed or captured by the CzAB belonged to 8th, 17th, 19th PzD and 311th StuG brigade, i.e. it encountered majority of German armored formations which is logical since for reasonable part of the operation it presented the strongest armored unit of the attackers. 

The ballance of AFV forces changed through the battle by the simple fact that the Germans were retreating all the time, i.e. everything left behind from whatever reason was lost (no fuel was also a reason). The other side kept returning knocked-out or bogged down vehicles over and over again but despite having days when only singular number of AFVs was available they kept advancing. For example the final breaktrhough into Ostrava city was done with only seven operational tanks in the brigade, two were knocked out (one by three Panzerfaust hits, the other by PaK) but at end of the day the CzAB had again seven tanks because two were repaired during the day. Also there were some AFV reinforcements on Soviet side later in the operation (the most important was the 42nd GTB with 40 IS-2). 

3 hours ago, delete013 said:

If you find German side of the story (Heinrici's opinion on the situation, for example), then you might get some credible facts out of this.

Anyone's memoires, especially of prominent nazi persons are not facts and I'm not interested in them. 

6 hours ago, LoooSeR said:

 

   From reports it seems they are launching rockets at multiply towns, instead of dumbing all payload into 1. Which results in ~low damage in targeted towns. Maybe they don't want to cause too much damage to not trigger land operation? Not sure about their reasoning.

I guess that the price of those hundreds of Iron Dome interceptors is higher than the damage on the ground. 

Anyway it's clear that even thousands of Hamas rockets have negligible damaging effect for Izrael. 

Crazy footage from recent mass rocket barages over Israel which managed to saturate the Iron Dome defence and cause damage on the ground including a hit into a powerplant, oil pipe and an oil storage. 

New video from Czech IFV military trials. Some speed driving.

How much time does it take to deploy and to reload RBS-70NG?

On 4/26/2021 at 3:01 AM, TokyoMorose said:

 

Gee it's awfully funny that all of the personal combat logs whine about panzerfausts, and German records recall there being literally hundreds of them in the AO - but the fact that they didn't report the losses as being to them must mean it never happened. And yes, the losses to fausts were so low that the Soviets didn't improvise bedspring armor in a desperate attempt to do something against them, and that the soviets most certainly didn't bother capturing and reverse engineering them. Not at all. I think it is far more likely someone on the soviet side simply messed up (records are hardly faultless on any side!) with recording the losses rather than all of the combat logs being wrong and the hundreds of panzerfausts in the area apparently doing absolutely nothing despite being in a perfect situation.

 

And yes, Norge's *nominal* AT assets are quite sad. But given the condition of the battlefield I would bet money at least some bigger AT guns were attached to them ad-hoc from other battered units. Nobody records every ad-hoc attachment, look at the utter mess of ad-hoc formations during Bagration and Zitadelle - these are well known to exist but their exact composition is never going to be fully known.

Sorry if off-topic but I guess this would be interesting for you. 

I have just finished reading the chronicle of Czechoslovak tank brigade in USSR and since this was the only our tank unit on the eastern front (and the first unit to reach today's Czech Republic territory) and a relatively small unit, it's pretty well documented and researched day by day, name after name, tank after tank. I'm giving here some confirmed numbers from Ostrava operation which was in a way comparable to Berlin thrust. The battle was fought in the same time (but it took twice longer and even fighting for Opava/Troppau city took longer than for Berlin proper), it was fought for the last industrial area of the Third Reich (80% of industry by March 1945) and against up to 50 km deep defence lines (prepared by Heinrici) strenghtened by Czechoslovak pre-war fortifications (even though the Germans removed most of the weapons, cupolas etc. for Atlantic wall in previous years the objects were still literally immune to any field artillery weapons and some kept fighting till the end of war). The defenders had 25 divisions including 4 tank ones (8th, 16th, 17th, 19th, of course few on full strength by that time) while the attackers had very few tanks because of Berlin. The defence was also strenghtened by a lot of rivers, dense network of towns and villages and muddy spring soil. At the beginning of the second phase (the first phase happened farther to the east without success and without our tank brigade) there were only 63 Czechoslovak T-34 (10 of them T-34/76), 21 Soviet T-34 and 10 Soviet Su-76M. The Germans had 84 Panthers and a lot of other AFVs. Later Soviets added two batallions with 40 IS-2 obr.1944 and several other AFV units. For most of the fighting the Czechoslovak brigade was spearheading the attack in direction of Ostrava city (except for the first phase).  

Now the stats. In 38 days of active fighting in the operation the Czechoslovak brigade lost 52 tanks written off (43 T-34/85 and 9 T-34/76), basically all were damaged at some point but they kept returning in service over and over again because the unit kept advancing all the time. The manpower losses including tank riders were 148 dead and roughly 300 wounded. Tanks were usually lost to Panzerfausts in urban areas or in ambushes by tank destroyers and tanks in prepared camouflaged positions. Rather small number was destroyed by AT artillery or 88 mm Flak which is probably due to an extensive use of surprising directions of attack, use of speed and smokescreen (by artillery) which sometimes led to the capture of settlements before the defenders could get back to their weapons after the artillery barage. Also very few losses came from German counter attacks. Four tank commanders were killed by snipers. 

The confirmed German material losses by the Czechoslovak brigade are 24 tanks (mainly Panthers and some Pz.IV), 23 SPG (StuG.III, Jagdpanzer IV/L70, Jagdpanzer 38(t), Marder III and even one rare Jagdpanzer IV/70(a)), 17 Sd.Kfz.251 and 64 guns (including 15 Pak and 3 bateries of 88 mm Flak). Another at least two tanks (one Pz.IV, one Panther) and seven Sd.Kfz.251 were captured (also one Kettenkrad and other vehicles). The Pz.IV was later used by the brigade, the Panther not. Manpower losses are only estimated but they were very high because only the number of captured was in high hundreds while in a single engagement the number of POWs was usually lesser than number of the dead, there were quite many cases when units of SS fought to the last man. For exmaple in a fight for Štítina village there were 130 dead German bodies but only 2 captured (the combined Soviet/Czechoslovak losses in the same village were also over 100 dead).   

All data including photographs of a large portion of the destroyed German AFVs in the battle can be found in a book ISBN 80-86524-00-0.

P.S. About aircraft. In the entire history of the unit since 1943 to 1945 no tank was destroyed by an aircraft, only one was immobilised for a day. 

Long video about Dana M2 Ukrainean trials (in Ukrainean language), production of the SPGs in Ukraine. EA representative says that the vehicles can be later upgraded to Dita by replacing the turret and updating the FCS. Otherwise I understand only few bits here and there. 

On 4/28/2021 at 7:45 PM, Beer said:

Photos from the military trials scrutineering of the three contenders for the Czech IFV tender. 

 

Interestingly the CV90 is on rubber tracks while the ohters on metalic ones. 

https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/nato/bvp-obrana-metnar-havlicek-vlada-pasove-vozidla-armada-vybor.A210428_131259_zpr_nato_inc/foto/nahledy

Short video:

3 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

Nobody's using turbines right? I didn't mention it in this thread yet, nor update the range calculator, but there's an 0.7 times modifier on range for turbines.

Is the Lone state of Texas even able to produce high heat reistant alloys for turbine vanes? 

1943 comparison trials of Soviet and German helmets: https://warspot.net/43-whose-helmet-was-better

British trials of the Panther, both war-time and post-war: https://warspot.net/342-a-german-cat-in-king-george-s-court

I'm currently reading the chronicle of Czechoslovak tank brigade in USSR (WW2) and I have stumbled upon two interesting things (among many others). 

During fighting on Ondava river in December 1944 (behind Dukla pass) the unit's SU-85 allegedly successfully used AA timed shells (for 52-K) against German observation post on the cliff on the other side of the river. Are there other reports about using AA munion in SU-85 or T-34/85? 

And for the lulz... The December 1944 fighting on the Ondava river was on a static line because the units were exhausted after bitter fighting over the Dukla pass. It was very cold (around -20°C) and the tanks usually stayed in defence posts for a long time with their crews freezing inside. One crew of T-34/76 installed a stove in the tank. Don't say anymore that T-34 was cramped inside   

Alleged footage of super-low bombing run of an Armenian Su-25 during the war.

A brief (hopefully) bit deadly conflict errupted between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. There are dozens of ddead confirmed (31 dead including civilians on Kyrgyz side alone). It seems that just like with the Chinese-Indian conflict the core of the dispute is control of water sources.